SBU’s Jing Chen wins NSF award, $500K grant

Jing Chen, SBU assistant professor and NSF Career award winner.

March 24, 2016

Jing Chen, an assistant professor of computer science at Stony Brook University, has landed a prestigious award – and $500,000 grant – from the National Science Foundation to pursue her work in game theory, economics and social sciences.

The foundation’s CAREER Award is given to promising young university faculty nationwide who exemplify the role of teacher-scholar through research, excellent education and the integration of both education and research. Chen, who also teaches economics and is the adviser for Women in Computer Science at Stony Brook University, will receive the money over the next five years to support her project, “A Theory of Mechanisms with Unstructured Beliefs.”

The grant will also enable her to broaden opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, with a special emphasis on encouraging women and underrepresented minorities in coursework and investigation based on the study of the theory of mechanisms.

Mechanism design has broad applications in distributed computation, social networks, healthcare and multi-agent systems at large. According to Chen, the proposed research “will make a profound contribution to the foundation of distributed systems and game theory.”

Chen received her PhD in Computer Science from MIT in 2012 and joined Stony Brook in 2013.